Stuck On you
by A.A. Pessimal
Summary: I couldn't resist this. Reg Shoe, Zombie policeman and political activist, falls in love. Inspired by an Alice Cooper song and throwaway references in the Canon. This is my sick and twisted mind again. I may continue this - warning, it could get sicker and more twisted.
1. enter Cold Ethel

_**Stuck On You**_

_What happens when a Zombie falls in love? Reg Shoe encounters a new complication of Undead life... inspired by Alice Cooper's very sick and very, very, funny "Cold Ethyl", a tasteless ditty to necrophilia._

"So how long have you been dead, then?" Reg Shoe asked. It wasn't the most inspired line, he knew. But there was something about Ethel...

She shrugged. A little dust cascaded.

"Oh, two or three years." she said, as if it were no big thing. "And you?"

"Over thirty years, now." he said, with some pride. It didn't make him the oldest Zombie in town, he knew. The lawyer Slant was pushing for six hundred years dead. He'd heard some of the old kings of Djelibeybi had managed nearly six thousand, with the aid of good embalming and lots of bandages to, you know, hold it all together. But it gave him a little street-cred in the city's small but vocal Zombie community.

She looked at him with appraising eyes. They weren't all that sunken, yet.

"Maybe you can show me, you know, how it all goes. Oh, thanks, Igor!"

Igor, the bar-thing at Biers, moved his mouth into something approximating a smile.

"Least I can do." he said. "On the house. Sorry it didn't seem to work out."

He set down two shot glasses full of formaldehyde. Zombies didn't need to eat or drink in the conventional sense. Or even to breathe. But Biers was set up to cater for the needs of all the city's undead and differently vitalised. Igor knew all their preferences and needs and could cater for them. He also knew when not to intrude on a possibly private moment between two customers, and he returned to the bar. Reg understood: his formaldehyde on the house was the sort of perk a barman gave to a Watchman. Ethel's was consolation for the way her act had been received. It had been some way short of a roaring success.

Igor had heard other pubs around the city had boosted trade by bringing in lunchtime strippers. After a long hard think in which he had still failed to grasp a few essential truths, he had put up a poster advertising _"Dead Girls!" _and asked the Guild of Ecdysiasts, Nautchers, Cancanieres and Exponents of Exotic Dance if they had any suitable performers. Miss Dixie "Va-Va"-Voom!, the Guild president, had frowned thoughtfully and said she would ask around. And, on that Wednesday lunchtime, Ethel had turned up and performed her act, to underwhelming results. Oh, in life she'd been a stripper. That had been before the creature Wazir and Webb **(1)** had assured her was a tame and harmless Large Common Grass Snake had turned out to be a Howondalandian Spitting Mamba. Tired of being manhandled, it had bitten her in an unkind place **(2)** and had escaped in the ensuing confusion, finally finding sanctuary in a post box on the corner of Zephyr Street. **(3)**

Ethel had blinked and returned to another sort of life on the mortuary slab at the Lady Sybil. Doctor Lawn had groaned, said "not again!" and given her an introduction card to the Fresh Start Club. She had pocketed this, and gone straight back to Miss Dixie to ask for advice. The Strippers' Guild president had said "well, you're still fairly fresh. I supose we could still find work for you. At least, for a _little_ while..." and had kept her on the books. She had not contacted the Fresh Start Club, seeing a new lease on life. But as a couple of years progressed, she found the bookings dwindling to nothing. A cleaning job at the University had terminated after she'd had a row with Professor Hix about post-mortem communications. Hix, a man who found Zombies to be a professional embarrassment,**(4)** hadn't been pleased, and she was out of work. Then the call to be a stripper had come again.

Reg had lurched into Biers on his day off for a quiet drink. He had watched the thin, gaunt, red-haired stripper take the stage, and had realised what she was the moment her clothes started coming off. As had the rest of the clientele who had sat, perched, squatted on their hindlegs or otherwise frozen with amazement and open-mouthed consternation. It just wasn't _working..._

"Look." said Reg, kindly. "I still run the Club. A shame you didn't drop by earlier. Look, maybe you could, I don't know, come and see Mr Vimes with me? We don't have nearly enough Zombies in the Watch, and you look like you could make a good recruit. You don't really have a future as a stripper, I think, and I've never really been comfortable with the gender-relations issues it raises and the way the patriarchal system imposes subordinate roles on women..."

She cut him short.

"Reg, if you're going to start spouting feminist dogma at me and coming on like Erica Mungbean or Germaine Grinder, I'm walking out of here..."

He hastened to reassure her. He'd never met anyone like this before. He didn't want to lose her. New thoughts were pushing for attention in his hindbrain. Could it be called necrophilia if _both_ partners were dead?

As they left Biers and walked around to Pseudopolis Yard, where she had consented to at least _look_ at the application forms, she consented to let him link his arm through hers, but very, very, carefully.

Reg Shoe felt as if he'd died and was looking at the gates of Heaven...

* * *

The city's only licenced wild animal dealers, who approach the trade with the sort of cheerful disregard for trades descriptions or indeed professional ethic which can only be found in Ankh-Morpork. See my story **_Zoo Tales._**

The back bar of the Troll's Head. This is a tough audience for any performer.

Eventually recaptured by Johanna Smith-Rhodes in _**Nature Studies. **_Had she known the serpent had a prejudice against red-haired women, Johanna would probably have gone in even harder and given it an additional grudge to bear.

Because maintaining an expensive department in Post-Mortem Communications (definitely not Necromancy) and performing elaborate rituals to be able to speak to the Dead , are rendered quite redundant when one of the Dead is standing there, in plain sight, holding a dustpan and brush. Especially when she points out you could speak to me any time you want, Prof.

* * *

_**Alice Cooper - Cold Ethyl**_

_Lyrics:_  
One thing I miss is Cold Ethyl and her skeleton kiss;  
We met last night making love under the refrigerator light!  
Ethyl Ethyl let me squeeze you in my arms,  
Ethyl Ethyl come and freeze me with your charms!

One thing,  
No lie,  
Ethyl's frigid as an eskimo pie!  
She's cool in bed,  
Well she oughta be 'cuz Ethyl's dead!

Ethyl Ethyl let me squeeze you in my arms,  
Ethyl Ethyl come and freeze me with your charms,  
Come on Cold Ethyl,  
Freeze me babe...

One thing - it's true!  
Cold Ethyl I am stuck on you!  
And everything is my way,  
Ethyl don't have much to say!

Ethyl Ethyl let me squeeze you in my arms,  
Ethyl Ethyl come and freeze me with your charms!  
Come here Cold Ethyl...  
What makes you so cold? Ooh so cold...

Cold Ethyl  
Cold Cold Ethyl  
Cold Ethyl  
Cold Cold Ethyl  
Cold Ethyl  
Cold Cold Ethyl  
Cold Ethyl  
Cold Cold Ethyl  
If I live 'til ninety-seven,  
You'll still be waiting in refrigerator heaven,  
'cuz you're cool,  
You're on ice,  
Cold Ethyl,  
You're my paradise!


	2. The RomZomCom continues

_**Stuck On You 2: **_

_The second unedifying episode of my Zombie Romantic Comedy. Or "ZomRomCom". Thank you for the good reviews and a general message that you want more. Here it is, in which Ethel joins the Watch and Reg Shoe frets about, er, practical matters. This might be seen as a spin-off from "The Civilian Assistant", so two for the price of one, here. _

_**Six weeks later. Ankh-Morpork. **_

The group of Watchmen in the alley looked down at the corpse and adopted positions of resigned stoicism. They'd all seen dead bodies before, after all. One of the Watchmen was used to seeing her own dead body in the mirror every morning. It was nothing new to her. So other peoples' dead bodies lacked the usual sense of the morbid and macabre, even though this was the first time she'd seen one up close. She suspected this was another of Commander Vimes' little tests for a new recruit; she had a feeling that were she to have done a Reg Shoe and harangued the corpse, telling it to shake off the prejudices of ignorant vitalism, to get up and walk and embrace Undead status, she'd only be fulfilling some sort of expectation and she'd lose marks for it. **(1)**

Nobby Nobbs straightened up, or at least adopted a more vertical slouch, as he finished the mandatory chalk outline.

"Definitely deceased, sir." he reported. Vimes grunted. He'd tagged along with a couple of the new recruits to see how they were shaping up on the streets. A murder victim in an alley had been too good to pass over.

"Right." Vimes said, indicating the corpse. "We have a strangely dressed cadaver lying here. By the look of it, he's been not only savagely beaten, but also stabbed, shot with several arrows, by both a conventional bow and also a pistol crossbow, and by the smell of things doused in lamp oil. There is a spilled box of matches over here. Which indicates?"

One of the other recruits tentatively lifted a hand. Vimes nodded.

"They wanted to set fire to the body, but a Watch patrol happened by and the killers were scared off?"

"Good." Vimes said. "And the _modus operandi_ tells us...?"

His stony gaze took in the other new recruit.

"Somebody _really_ wanted to make sure, sir?" she ventured. Vimes nodded again.

"Evidently somebody who didn't make friends easily." he said. "And what does the mode of dress tell us? Probationary Lance-Constable Mercaptan?"

Ethel Mercaptan would have swallowed nervously if she were still alive. But she stepped up and failed to take a deep breath.

"Er. The deceased is dressed in an outlandish glossy-white suit. It has an unfeasibly large collar and the bottoms of the trousers are cut into a strange flaring effect. In white, _very_ impractical on these streets. You can tell. The front of the tunic is cut to the waist revealing his bare chest. Everything is ornated with Ankhstones. Very gaudy. Very tasteless. His hair is dyed black and oiled, shaped into something looking like a duck has perched on his head. A sign of insanity? Impractical high-heeled boots. Leather ornately tooled. I'm surprised they haven't been stolen. Over there, broken spectacles, but with obsidian lenses."

"And your conclusion, Probationary Lance-Constable Mercaptan?" Vimes probed, still impassive. He took a draw on his cigar.

"Errrm... it's an elvish impersonator, sir?"

Vimes smiled slightly.

"Right! Silly sod. So the suspects we're looking for?"

Ethel relaxed into the home straight.

"Trolls? Dwarfs? That looks like a mattock imprint. Gargoyles? Feegle? Lancrastrians?" she ventured.

"Or Assassins, inhuming an offence against taste? Monks of Cool hitsquad, even?" Vimes prompted. "So that's a good three hundred thousand suspects. Good spotting on the mattock, by the way. All Dwarf mining tools are personalised, so if we had the inclination - _and the manpower_ - we could trace it back. But somebody's also beaten him repeatedly over the head with his own guitar."

"They really wanted him dead, sir." Nobbs said, eager to make a contribution.

Vimes smiled, grimly. There was absolutely no humour in it.

"And your report will state, Probationary Lance-Constable Mercaptan?"

Ethel floundered. Vimes, who knew where to let off a promising recruit, supplied the answer.

"No further action required. This is a clear-cut case of suicide. In this case, suicide by being bloody stupid. Being an Elvish impersonator in a town full of dwarfs, trolls, and Lancre emigrants? This blow here could have been done by a Morris dancing stick, do you notice? Well done, let's wait for the wagon, l_eave those boots alone, Nobby! , _then back to the Yard."

Ethel relaxed. It could have been worse.

* * *

"What do you reckon to the new batch of recruits, Carrot?" Vimes asked, up in the office.

"Well, sir, Probationary Lance-Constables N'Goyen and N'Dubitabl are shaping up very well, although we're likely to lose them soon when they go back to Howondaland. If I may advise, sir, we could put them on a rural beat out in the Shires, as it's the nearest thing to the sort of policing they'll be doing at home? Besides, the Rimwards Howondalandians have complained to the Patrician about their policing a beat near their Embassy."

Vimes grunted. He'd vectored the two black constables to that beat to make a point.

"Shame we don't have any White Howondalandians among the recruits we can put on the Brookless Lane beat." he remarked. Vimes had a specialised appreciation of the diplomatic niceties. Specifically, how to make a point to foreign nationals with what to him were irrational and obnoxious prejudices. Lord Vetinari sanctioned this, in most cases, as his thoughts often concurred with Vimes with regard to foreign policy. And keeping foreign diplomats annoyed meant they weren't thinking too clearly and thus tended to reveal useful things.

Carrot ignored this, tactfully.

"Miss Mercaptan's shaping up nicely, sir." he said. "I remembered you did say we could use a few more Zombie officers. So when Reg brought her to the Yard to check out the application forms, I took the decision to fast- track her."

"Oh, yes." Vimes said, thoughtfully. "Probationary Lance-Constable Mercaptan. A good officer in the making, I thought. And let's face facts, Carrot. She knew she was finished as a stripper. At least, it would have to be a _very specialised _audience. So she came to us." He paused. "And she and Reg. They're... _err, _still?"

"Very definitely _err_, sir. Walking out together."

"Or at least, _lurching_ out together." Vimes reflected. He shook his head. Zombies in love took some getting used to.

"Miss Maccalariat thinks it's quite sweet, sir." Carrot said. "She was doing the _"let me be your kindly aunt"_ thing to Reg the other day. Giving him good advice as to how to court a lady and be romantic."

Vimes shook his head. Reg Shoe getting well-meaning romantic advice from a Maccalariat just compounded the essential strangeness of it all. He pulled up a memory.

"You know, Carrot, I knew Reg from before he became a zombie." he said.**(3) ** He thought of the young and hopelessly gauche Reg Shoe, just before his death.

"I really don't mind betting he didn't have much experience with young women even _before_ he died. And perhaps not a great deal _afterwards,_ come to think."

Carrot shrugged. "Nor did I, sir. There was Minty Rocksmacker, of course. And if truth be told, I had a bit of affection for our village witch, but I never plucked up the courage. She's Queen of Lancre now. Did well for herself. Reet, for a while. But it all worked out when I met Angua."

Vimes understood: prior to Sybil, practically the sum total of his romantic life had been Mavis Trouncer. He shuddered. But it had all worked out with Sybil. Maybe it would for Reg Shoe and Ethel Mercaptan. But how the Hells were they going to get around the _till Death us do part _bit? And he cursed his vivid imagination. There were surely other, more practical, problems, if they ever got round to sharing a marital coffin... Vimes returned to the present, with a mighty effort. He got round to routine policing matters again.

"Find me Detritus, would you, Carrot? I need to talk to him about this Troll applicant's intelligence test."

He read from the document.

_Question many-lots and two. What am Rabies and how would you ree-cog-nize it? What you do? _

_Answer: raBies are a sortta priest. Dey are human, dey wear der clerikaL collar. I traet them like a troLl shaman, give dem lotsa resPeckt and do what I can for dem. _** (4)**

He looked up from the paper. Carrot kept an absolutely poker face.

"I'll go and get Detritus, sir." he offered.

* * *

**Just a short interim chapter – more to follow!**

**(1) **These days, Reg (aided by a tolerant Igor) waited until the corpse arrived in the Watch mortuary before nipping down to the cellar and slipping a Fresh Start Club card into its hand as it laid on the slab.**(2)**

**(2) **Or in the case of Bertram Figginborough, a former steelworker pushed into the rolling mill by the jealous husband of his mistress, laid out over _several_ slabs. Even Igor thought there wasn't much point in giving that corpse an FSC card to raise his consciousness.

**(3) **See _**Night Watch**_, by Terry Pratchett.

**(4) **Yes. I've lifted this from the LAPD Sergeant's exam paper quoted by Joseph Wambaugh in t_**he Choirboys**_. It's too good to waste.


End file.
